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Comment by jbullock35 | Hacker News Reader

This paper examines only those who are extraordinarily able: Nobel Prize winners, Fields Medalists, and International Math Olympiad medalists.

It's interesting, but the current HN headline ("Migrants to the US are up to 6 times more productive than migrants elsewhere") seems misleading. The paper is taking up < 0.01% of "migrants to the U.S."

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The submitted title broke the HN guidelines against editorializing titles. Cherry-picking a detail from an article and making that the title is a form of editorializing—the most common form, in fact.

I've replaced it with the first sentence of the abstract, which does a slightly more accurate and neutral job of expressing what the article is about than the primary title does.

"Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Also, the 'six times more productive' stat turns out to mean Math Olympiad medallists who migrate to the US are six times more likely to get a speaking slot at the International Congress of Mathematicians than people who stay at home; an impressive accomplishment but hardly what most people would call 'productivity'. On the slightly less arcane measure of weighted academic citations, migrants to the US have twice as many as migrants to other countries, or four times as many as those who stay at home.

Or put another way: moving to country with best funded and most prestigious research institutions turns out to be useful if you want a high-profile academic career

> migrants to the US have twice as many [citation-weighted papers] as migrants to other countries, or four times as many as those who stay at home

Nitpicky, but... this is also only for IMO medalists (from 1980 to 2000) publishing papers in mathematics (up until 2017). It's pretty darned specific, even as it pertains to academics. Even as it pertains to mathematicians, it's a single snapshot of somewhat recent history.

One of those groups is not like the other :) Thanks anyway, but IMO medals (even Gold) does not make migrating to the US easier.

As for the paper, why doesn't it compare US citizen performance? The Team Selection Test is pretty competitive, and I guess there are at least 20 US citizens each year who are of similar skill.

I beat 1/6 members of the US team at my IMO showing, but I'm pretty sure every single USA TST participant has a brighter future ahead than most of the general cohort of "IMO medallists", including me.

Thats true. I would like to know if the demographics of those high performing migrants are representative of the US’s entire migrant population. If not, then it’s critically more accurate to say that some specific migrant groups are 6 times more productive than migrants elsewhere.

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